Apparently Seattle fans should be punished for their “unsportsmanlike conduct.”

In a letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, two 49ers fans suggested the Seahawks have too much of a home-field advantage. It’s just not fair!

Unsportsmanlike conduct in Seattle

Was anyone else appalled by the unsportsmanlike conduct of the Seattle Seahawks and their fans, juiced on noise, which surely creates as big an advantage over an opponent as any performance enhancing drug and which, to their shame, NFL officials turn the same blind eye they have to concussions and drugs?

It would be simple to fix. Seahawks players and managers would ask their fans to cease and desist, and the NFL would implement a new rule: The visiting team may stop the game when fan noise is greater than a specified decibel level, and should this rule be violated in more than three games, no home games will be played at the offending field for the rest of the season, including playoff games. Things would quiet down.

At a time when the world seems sour, sports give us a place of joy, community and hope, and to have it spoiled is a bigger loss than it seems on the surface.

Judy Spelman, Rich Shiller
Point Reyes Station

Are. You. Serious? This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read. Penalizing fans for cheering on their home team? And doing it in a way that would remove home games from the schedule? Absurd. Crowd noise is part of the game.

By the way, Judy and Rich — there already is a rule to help visiting teams when the crowd gets too loud, though it is seldom invoked. Below is a video clip from a Jets-Lions game in 1997 in which the officials warned Detroit fans to quiet down or else the Lions would be charged with a timeout.

I couldn’t agree more with “Unsportsmanlike conduct in Seattle” (Letters, Sept. 17).

It wasn’t a game of skill anymore; it was an exhibition of excessive stadium noise, posturing obscenities in your opponent’s face to draw a foul and street-punk behavior to fire up tensions to gain any advantage to get the win.

I hope the NFL will listen before the fans go deaf. Please stop the excessive stadium noise, and just play football.

Ellen Gust
Palo Alto

Updated 5:58 p.m.: Dori Monson at KIRO radio got a hold of Spelman and Shiller — the authors of the first letter to the editor — and asked them to explain. As it turns out, they are definitely for real.

They even said they plan to write letters to the editor in all NFL cities and petition the league about changing its rules to silence fans. Here’s an excerpt from 710 ESPN Seattle radio’s write-up of the interview:

Judy says it’s clear the San Francisco receivers were confused because they couldn’t hear the plays.

“I don’t think it is sour grapes at all. I think what we’re saying is you put a whooping on the field because you had an unfair advantage. If you couldn’t hear your signals and we could hear ours, you would have lost and we would have won,” (Judy) says. “Home field advantage is a good thing everywhere, but I believe it doesn’t have to be with noise.”

It sounds like a joke, but they insist they’re serious.

“We think it’s dirty play. What you really want your team to do is to be the best team and you don’t want the play or the outcome of the game to be distorted by an outside force like extra fan noise,” (Judy) says.